Like many
bands that hope to persist through the years, Marilyn Manson has grown through his/their changes. Gone are the days of the lumpy Dope Hat (At
least for now. I can easily picture, oh ten or twenty years up the road,
where he and the band will return to their pre-Anti-Christ days and put
on a concert tour "for the kids"). Everybody who had
half a brain got the Alice Cooper reference and enjoyed ANTI-CHRIST SUPERSTAR
for what it was. I got a real kick out of the crotch huffing photo. This
band is a hoot! The fact that those old 1970's style antics with a bit
of updating can still shock is amazing. Marilyn pulled it off without
simply imitating but by recreating the fear and unease and suiting it
to match the times. Fans came away from the show feeling exhilarated but
upset, which was the point in the first place.

Like all things shocking, Madison avenue quickly began homogenizing Marilyn into
something a bit easier to swallow. Focusing on his affection for bizarre
contact lenses, eyewear companies have come out with an entire string
of their own crazy looking contacts. Not content to simply the change
your eyecolor to some other race? Change your eye color to nothing else
at all! Everything from the Marilyn Manson look to a black eightball.
Pro Wrestlers like STING have followed suit.

SEE? NO GENITALIA, NIPPLES, OR EMBARRASSING WETNESS! HAPPY NOW?

So instead of allowing himself to be co-opted, Marilyn has reinvented himself and
that is where OMEGA AND THE MECHANICAL ANIMALS comes in.

From a
1970's retro futuristic look via gold lame to a plasticized alien reconstruction
of Marilyn himself ("Itself" in this case.
You didn't like the constant genital references in his previous albums?
No problem! No genitals or nipples in this incarnation! Happy now? Who
wouldn't be?) The pictorial Bowie references are very explicit.

The album collaboration with Trent Reznor and David Bowie on the LOST
HIGHWAYS soundtrack has left its mark. The music sounds very Bowie-esque
as well, but this is a Bowie who moved forward with his talents instead
of running out of steam. In fact one song, The Speed Of Pain, starts off
with an acoustic riff that made me think of David Bowie's Space Oddity
before turning into a Bowie/Pink Floyd sound. This isn't a sound that
Manson and company are used to playing, but the band takes to it, expands
on it and somehow makes it their own, as surely as any great actor becomes
the role.

Since this review was written, Marilyn Manson cancelled their tour
after the April 1999 tragedy at Columbine High School in Colorado.

Despite the fact that the two underage murderers were racist and pro nazi,
they seemed to listen to Marilyn Manson, who is both Jewish and bisexual.

Historically speaking, Nazi's hate gays even more than Jews.

This oddball but true info didn't stop the liberal press from excitedly
feeding the flames of hysteria. The U.S. News Media questioned what
role bands likeMarilyn Manson and KMFDM
played in the mass murder, utterly ignoring the two boy's confusion
over their presumed role models. This in turn led to copycat murder
attempts throughout the U.S. by other wannabe teen media stars.
These ignorant lunkheads would write "Marilyn Manson"
on their bookbags thanks to thick-headed pseudo journalism by the
U.S. News Media.

With concern only for their own elections or tributes from favored lobbyists, and no
discernable thought for American Youth, the Washington D.C. elected
effluent turned
their attention back to their own longtime favorite targets.

The Right Wing wanted to crush the Constitutional Right to Free Speech and the
Left Wing wanted to crush the Constitutional Right to Bear Arms.

4 months later and nothing has happened in the Nation's capitol but whiny
hand ringing.
The politicians are left to their impotent political posturing,
and many parents are hoping that their TV will raise their children
to be better people.

As of August, 1999, the Constitution still stands.

"SO FUCK ALL YOUR PROTESTS AND PUT 'EM TO BED!"

The change
from Horror Show Manson to Future Despair is seamless for the band and
an incredible transformation considering all of the potential pitfalls
that had to be overcome. Pits that bands from KISS to PRINCE have fallen
into and many others as well.

Through the years we have heard radio play
Tears For Fears and their Beatle suck off, Rhino Bucket's AC/DC in drag,
and Kingdom Come clone themselves off of Led Zepplin. You won't hear such
false notes on Mechanical Animals.

Manson, together with his bandmates
who all pitched in to write the songs (talk about
a coherent bunch!), have created a lush album that enriches a lost
corridor of Rock and Roll, namely the much dissed glam rock. Yet Marilyn
and the gang never lose sight of who they are and, in the process, plasticize
themselves. I've listened to this CD over and over and not a single second
comes across as phoney or filler. U2 should be so complete, HA!

The actual
themes of the songs are standard Manson fare, they didn't lose their voice
over this one, but the music makes a change in the meaning of the songs
all of the same. Marilyn sometimes expresses concerns in places where
I don't understand them. Such is the case with User Friendly, where a
woman is only using him for sex,

He makes that sound like a bad thing and I'm not sure why. Many is the time I've
corralled some toy boy into lusting for and then stealing my girlfriend
away from me. It's always much easier to have a girlfriend break up with
me than me breaking up with her, plus she doesn't get angry with me and
steal my Judas Priest and Pink Floyd collection for spite. (Note
to my brothers: always, ALWAYS make sure you have a buddy somewhere who
is better looking and more successful than you.) Still, I guess
Marilyn is looking for an everlasting love. At any rate, he makes it sound
like it's a big deal to him so to each his own.

The thing about Manson is that at once he both derides humanity and isolates himself
from it, even while he considers rejoining it. In FUNDAMENTALLY LOATHSOME
he sings,

"And I am resigned to this wicked fucking world / On its way to hell."

Marilyn is not going to stop ape-ing the evils of this planet's various societies.
He will continue to show them up for the domesticated trash that they
are. He focuses primarily on his own country, the U.S.A., and chases after
both the conservative Christian base as well as the souless Liberals.
He attacks drug abuse despite the rumors of his own addictions. For Manson,
there is just so much wickedness that the American Christian accepts and
never fights against. If you bring it up to them, they will stare at you
with a dull blank expression, or open hostility for the vulgar act of
revealing their hypocrisy.

I personally have friends, some old enough to be my grandparents, that yearn for the
day when they can whip out their gun and "blow a bowling ball sized
hole through somebody giving me trouble." I believe everybody should
own at least one gun. But to call yourself a loving Christian and then
buy armor piercing hollow points? Preference over killing instead of wounding?
So much for the old days being so much better than today. As Marilyn says
in ROCK IS DEAD,"Rock! is Deader Than Dead / shock! is all in your head / Your sex
and your dope is all that we're fed / so fuck all your protests and put
em' to bed."

In a land where the bare-faced hypocritical citizens are more concerned with Monica
Lewinsky giving our two-term president a blow job than the multi-thousands
dying just off our borders in the largest Hurricane in the past 200 years;
in a nation where more people express hopelessness and shock over Marilyn
Manson and his media antics than they express outrage over three stupid
racist filth dragging a man to death behind their pick-up truck; I find
the look of Marilyn Manson and crew a hardcore kick in the ass of complacency.
Their music is great as well and, even after ten years in the biz (no overnight sensation here) they can still produce albums that set the bar for all others.

You want
pretense and collectable figurines? Go buy KISS stuff.
You want a bunch of no talent metal bands sucking up off the CANNIBAL
CORPSE/FEAR FACTORY sound? There are way too many to mention, but go for
what feeds you.

You want
music that is the real deal? Then get MAR1LYN MAN5ON: Mechanical Animals.

E.C. McMullen Jr. is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to amazon.com.

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